Tuesday, July 14, 2009

We nerfed you to buff you to nerf other classes to nerf you buy buff you.

The title really seems like a typical blue statement from someone at Blizzard. Half the time it really seems like they are talking out their ass and just trying not to piss us off. Sometimes they dont care. The latest talks about the ongoing changes to block and other avoidance is just damn annoying.

Quote from Blizzard staff

The future of BlockI feel like we've been pretty candid about its future. You can probably find my previous comments relatively easily. We think block needs to mitigate much more incoming damage per hit, but to make that change we would also need to lower tank avoidance across the board and prevent every hit from being blocked (especially in situations with more than one target beating on you). To make Prot tanking more interesting, we have allowed block to become too much of a dps stat. In retrospect, we'd rather it remained a mitigation stat and that Strength was pushed up as the big warrior and paladin dps stat.

So what this translates to is NERF. We want you to block more. We are making a shitty stat slightly better for mitigation and diminishing your good stats such as parry and dodge. We also want to gimp your threat....even though threat is currently a problem at the highest levels.

You shouldn't overly worry about outscaling content. We said from the beginning that there would be three major patches to Wrath of the Lich King. We aren't setting up a system that is going to remain on autopilot for 10 more tiers of content without our intervention. It's totally valid for players to worry about scaling, and all things considered, we'd rather have mechanics that scale well. But if those scaling problems aren't going to manifest themselves until you have item level 500 items, then you're worried prematurely.

Translation: Umm....we forsee that there could be problems in the future, but we will sweep it under the rug for now mmmkaaayyyy.

We would like to get Prot warriors into PvP in a legitimate way, but our first priority is making sure every class has at least one viable PvP spec first. By "legitimate" I do NOT mean that you sometimes can do a 19K Shield Slam when all the stars align. That's not acceptable even if it is rare. Also consider that tanks do have a legit role acting like actual tanks when running flags or tanking AV-style NPCs. That may not be enough of a role, but I did want to point out that emphasizing BGs more and Arenas less also helps to carve out a niche for PvP tanks.

Translation: We dont want you stinking up our arenas with your dirty prot specs. Never mind that they were never legit before Wrath, and now they are barely legit. We want them to be completly useless other than a small amount of utility.

I know there are plenty of Prot warriors out there who couldn't care less about PvP. Sorry. We have to.

We want Prot warriors to do decent damage in PvE. We don't want them to do as good damage as actual dps specs -- there needs to be a trade-off for such high survivability. This means we need threat multipliers or you won't be able to actually hold aggro. It's okay if Shield Slam can make big (yet not absurd) numbers, since you don't Shield Slam all that much. That's fun. As I said above though, it would probably work better if Shield Slam hit hard because your Strength was high, not because you built a gimmicky set. (Source)

This is true. I have thought that strength should have been a better stat for tanks all along. Block value sets are ridiculous. As a matter of fact, I think it would be better if they just converted all block value and block rating based only on strength. The there would be a nice reason to stack it. I dont ever see tank dps being too high from a Warrior's perspective. I out dps some , but that is usually due to a lack of gear. Druids and DKs may be a different story.

Avoidance changes in 3.2The main goal of the change was to make parry not so much less attractive than dodge as an avoidance stat. Since tank avoidance is so high already, we wanted to do that by nerfing dodge a little, not by buffing parry.

It is right there in the sentence. NERF. We dont care for parry. It is nice, but we never gem for it. People are still going to gem for dodge most likely.

This hurts druids slightly more than other tanks, but the emphasis is on "slightly." This is not the big druid nerf that some forum posters have predicted. We will continue to evaluate tank survivability and threat generation based on PTR tests with "Patchwerk" to decide if druids need to be nerfed or DKs buffed or look at Prot warrior dps or anything else.

I dont know how much of an avoidance nerf Druids need. I dont think there have been a lot of complaints about their avoidance. I think most complaints have come from other tanks who see them doing superior dps and threat while carrying a huge health pool.

This is also not the big avoidance "come to Naaru" that some posters predicted. Overall, we think avoidance is too high and the game would work better with lower tank avoidance, but suddenly dropping everyone's avoidance by 20 or 30% would be a very big change with many ramifications for healing and gear among other things. It would also feel like a big nerf to the many players who didn't understand why it would be better for the game in the long term. But I still expect it is coming at some

Is avoidance really that high? My avoidance is not that high. I am not dodging every, blocking, or parrying everything under the sun. Who is we? I dont think that "we" actually includes tanks. Maybe you should ask the tanks what is needed before you go "fixing" our classes. All you are doing by lowering avoidance is making the job of the healers that much more difficult.....which they really need in Ulduar 25. You arent just nerfing tanks in this situation, you are nerfing any class who heals.

I really do not agree with the tanks changes taking place so far. I think they feel hasty and like a crappy bandaid for the problems that are actually present. Sure block being better would be nice, but not at the cost of the rest of our avoidance going to crap. A turd is a turd no matter how much frosting you try to put on it.

4 comments:

Translation "We don't understand tanking, but we don't like the way block works, so we're gonna tinker with it this patch, throw it up against the wall, see what sticks, and if enough people complain, we"ll change it again."

Personally (granted from a pally perspective), block only barely counts as mitigation as even if you block every hit, the amount reduced is fairly miniscule so to me, it's not a "sexy" stat.

I think all of the complaining I see about this avoidance nerf is kinda ridiculous.

I have an alt tank in mostly Naxx 10 / Heroic gear with 55% avoidance. I do think that's pretty extreme.

My main is a healer and it annoys me when tanks think avoidance is the greatest thing ever and gear for it. Oh boy: no damage, no damage, no damage, dies in one unlucky hit because man, that avoidance is awesome, who needs armour or health? That's sure easy to heal.

Avoidance doesn't make you easier to heal. It makes you think you're awesome when you get those strings of dodges/parries and it lets you do better when there's no healer.